The variety of names

I defend a form of semantic pluralism about proper names. Proper names are, like pronouns, singular terms, and as such rigid and semantically simple. Though occurrences of proper names are often directly referential, I argue that proper names also---like pronouns---sustain anaphoric occurrences, in which case the work roughly in the manner of first-order variables. Instead of a unified theory of names in terms of their contributions to propositions expressed by sentences in which they occur, I argue that singular terms are unified in terms of a requirement that they take unstructured values, a requirement issued by compositional constraints associated with grammatical theory, and that these constraints are flexible with regard to the particular semantic values of occurrences of such terms. I develop a two-tier semantic framework to model the discourse contributions of such terms, and motivate a form of semantic two-dimensionalism that is more austere than most existing two-dimensional systems but that is nevertheless powerful enough to provide novel solutions to a range of traditional problems associated with singular terms, such as the problem of the contingent a priori, the problem of empty names, and---more tentatively---Frege's puzzle.